ASA 125th Meeting Ottawa 1993 May

3aSP13. Perception of coarticulatory cues in the speech of profoundly
hearing-impaired and normally hearing children.

Shari R.Baum

SHCD, McGill Univ., 1266 Pine Ave. W., Montreal, PQ H3G 1A8, Canada

Robin S. Waldstein

CUNY Graduate Ctr., New York, NY 10036

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues in the
speech of normally hearing (NH) and profoundly hearing-impaired (HI) children.
To examine anticipatory coarticulation, five repetitions of the syllables [si
su ti tu ki ku] produced by nine NH and nine HI children were edited to include
only the aperiodic consonantal portion. To explore perseveratory
coarticulation, comparable segments were excised from the syllables [is us it
ut ik uk]. Ten listeners were asked to identify the missing vowel. Results
revealed that, for anticipatory coarticulation, listeners were able to identify
the absent vowel with better-than-chance accuracy for all stimuli but the HI
speakers' [s] tokens. For perseveratory coarticulation, identification accuracy
was worse overall, but still significantly above chance for the NH stimuli; for
the HI children's productions, only [k] tokens yielded better-than-chance vowel
identification. Listener's identification of NH speakers' tokens was
significantly better than that of HI speakers' productions for both
anticipatory and perseveratory contexts. Results are discussed in relation to
the nature of speech production in the HI and the role of contextual cues in
speech perception.